20 January

Now, publishers and authors know that they currently get 7-15% of the list price for physical books, and 25% for digital books. 70 percent sounds like a huge bump, but it’s not that simple.

To be able to get the 70 percent royalty deal, the list price for your title must be both between $2.99 to $9.99 and be 20 percent below the lowest physical book price; title also must be “offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices”.

21 January

[After her death,] Leslie’s family allowed her domains smug.com, harpold.com and others to expire and politely turned down all requests to mirror her sites. Several of her friends, including me, had offered after her death to pay the costs required to keep them online. [….]

Perhaps this is the way it should be. No one has found an email or web page where Leslie stipulated her desires for her work in the event of her death, leaving the decision to her heirs.

Well, for the record, if someone’s stupid enough to want to mirror my sites and/or pay to renew my server(s) after my death, I’m all for it.

It sucks for someone who invested herself into her online work to completely disappear from the web just because her family doesn’t like what she posted.

22 January

I’m rather surprised that he was noticeably slower with Graffiti than on the Newton — so goes progress. (Also interesting that he wasn’t that much faster on the MacBook than on the iPhone, but he acknowledges that he isn’t very fast on a computer keyboard.)

Here comes that time of the year when Apple pundits, big and small and wannabe, have to man up and put their credibility on the line, writing up their definitive specialist’s opinion on the matter of what Steve is and isn’t going to announce in his upcoming keynote. (Thankfully, nobody expects any credibility from those types anyway, so there’s nothing to lose.)

What’s going to be announced? is the question we ask about four times a year, but this time may well be the keynote of all keynotes: it’s not about a refresh of the Mac lineup, or new functionality in iTunes, but it is (or isn’t?) about the infamous Apple tablet. Even the days before the original iPhone announcement weren’t as frantic: we already knew smartphones then, we knew why they ought to be important, and we thought we knew what we were gonna get (which, to a certain extent, we did). With the tablet, though, Apple doesn’t just present a “breakthrough device” (to quote the horrible expression Jobs used that time): they get to invent a brand new market altogether, and sell us a concept that nobody has managed to make work yet.

But is there gonna be a tablet?

Yes. It’s that simple. As far as I’m concerned, once an Apple rumor has been written up in the Wall Street Journal, you can consider that it’s been officially confirmed. Besides, given how convinced everyone is and has been for a month, if Apple wasn’t actually going to launch a tablet, you can be sure they would leak that to the WSJ; that thing has been hoped for and awaited and expected before but, at this point, no matter what else Steve Jobs could announce on next Wednesday, stock prices would tank unacceptably if he didn’t show the unicorn.

Sources for iLounge say that the tablet will have not one, but two dock connectors—one on the horizontal bottom, and one on a vertical “bottom.” This would allow the device to be docked in either landscape or portrait orientation while charging. This way, the tablet could perform different functions—playing video or reading books, for example—while set in a single charging station.

I’m not sure how you make a dock, and dock connector, solid and stable enough to hold the tablet almost-but-not-quite vertically, but that idea does indeed solve the matter of an integrated stand.

Then in the last couple days came indications from many gaming related publications small and large that they had been invited to the special Apple event on 1/27. This shows a clear push by Apple to have the device covered in the games press, pointing to gaming as a major target for the device.

Oh, right, I hadn’t picked up on that (even though I follow gaming press journalists on Twitter and they did mention being invited). That’s scary, because Apple doesn’t know how to do gaming — and most game publishers don’t [care to] know how to take advantage of new platforms — but the article mentions World of Goo, so there’s hope yet.

— In fact, I’m realizing that it isn’t so much that people didn’t read it entirely, but nobody answers their e-mail now if they don’t imperatively have to; it used to be just me, but it looks like everybody’s been catching up.
And that’s why we need a “like” button on every single communication medium under the sun.

28 January

Let’s put that in perspective: it’s the same price as a 32GB iPod touch just two years ago, and only $200 more than the current 32GB touch, despite having a much larger screen, more powerful hardware, and more features. But perhaps the more telling comparison is that Amazon’s similarly-size Kindle DX, with its non-color, non-touch-sensitive screen and much more limited functionality, is priced at $489.

Well, that was… something. I just about went through all phases of grief during that one-hour keynote, starting when Steve Jobs announced that name and when, a minute later, the first official screenshot of the iPad’s home screen appeared on the web. Omigod, it’s just a giant iPod touch.

Or is it?

The thing is, Steve Jobs pulled the wool over our eyes from the start, when he said again that netbooks are crap, and it only became evident at the very end, when he announced the list price: the iPad is Apple’s netbook.

That’s what it is and nothing else.

And it’s offered at an okay price for a product you’d define as “Apple’s netbook” — the upper limit of what could be an okay price, but that in itself was to be expected.

It’s not at all what I hoped for, but it’s not just a giant iPod, either — and it’s also noticeably cheaper than I expected. The special version of iWork (I so didn’t see that coming) and the starting price point are what define it as a netbook; as such, it’s not something anyone absolutely needs, but it’s something many people will want, and I’m thinking that a large enough number of those people will buy it. (Of course, unlike netbook makers, Apple will actually make a profit on those sales.)

And if you take the optional 3G plan, that makes it that much more of a bargain. Unlocked device (heh, fool Steve Jobs once…), no contract, very competitive prices? Here’s hoping Apple manages to negotiate equivalent offers in the rest of the world — but if they managed to get AT&T on board, how hard can it be? (It’s kind of a bargain for a carrier to support both iPhone and iPad anyway, as there’s bound to be customer overlap and customers will end up paying twice for the same unlimited data.)

Now, the ball is in Microsoft’s camp, to release the Courier or not. But I’m very afraid Redmond doesn’t have the guts. (Just as afraid as hopeful, really. I need to sell apps on the iPad, so I need to buy an iPad, so that makes the cheap part of me not so eager for Microsoft to offer a decent competitor.)

Some of the new accessories include a $29 VGA to Dock Connector Adapter, a similarly priced Camera Accessory Kit that has a USB adapter and a SD memory card slot, alongside the $69 Keyboard Dock.

There’s only one dock connector on the device, I don’t think there’s a hub of connectors on the dock itself, and the VGA cable seems to have only one in and one out; do you really have to choose between charging your iPad and using an external screen?

So Jobs’s demo of the NYT’s web site showed the “missing Flash” icon in several spots. If you think Apple didn’t expect that, you’re nuts. Apple is not embarrassed by iPhone OS’s lack of Flash.

My initial reaction, watching the video after I read the transcript, was that Jobs was going “Oops! Damn, I can’t press ‘Back’ right away, gotta keep it cool.” But when you think about it, it does seem like he lingers happily on that lego block when he could easily scroll down a few inches. A little teasing.

Used to be that to drive a car, you, the driver, needed to operate a clutch pedal and gear shifter and manually change gears for the transmission as you accelerated and decelerated. Then came the automatic transmission. With an automatic, the transmission is entirely abstracted away. The clutch is gone. To go faster, you just press harder on the gas pedal.

That’s where Apple is taking computing.

That’s a very interesting analogy.

And this is a good point, too:

Also interesting is iPad Safari. Even though the screen offers the same pixel count as what was once the standard size for a laptop display, iPad Safari renders pages like iPhone Safari. The web surfing experience is all about zooming and panning.

29 January

This is the iPad’s intended audience. People who have a PC and use 10% of its features and software 90% of the time. People like my Mom & Dad who browse the web, read news, send email and watch videos. People like my cousin Jenny who chats with friends, uses Facebook and uploads photos. Regular folks. Consumers.

And when you look at the kind of trouble regular folks get in when they use computers, you do have to wonder if the black-box system and controlled App Store aren’t actually the best thing they could have.

32% of visitors to John Gruber’s Mac blog Daring Fireball, which has a large percentage of visitors from the Flashless-by-default iPhone/iPod touch, did not have Flash enabled. Andy Baio says 16% of Waxy.org visitors don’t have Flash enabled, up from 4% a year ago. This site wasn’t around a year ago, but about 16% of Smarterware visitors don’t have Flash enabled either.

That is, it synchronizes with a cloud database that’s supported by more and more iPhone and Mac apps. And NV’s developer is geek enough that he thought the sync process over quite thoroughly, as explained in this post.

Great news, since I just started using Simplenote earlier this week to communicate notes and thoughts from my iPhone to my Mac (it’s simpler and cleaner than emailing yourself).